Based on this excerpt, what can readers infer about the stories the fishermen were told about the barbarians?

The stories are completely true.

The stories lack detail.

The stories are completely false.

The stories are exaggerations.

The stories are exaggerations.

Excerpt:

Read the excerpt from Heart of a Samurai and then answer the question.

Eleven eyes. When at last he dared to look up, what he noticed was their eyes. Each pair a different color: green as a stormy sea, blue as the sky, black as night, or brown as his own. One man had only one eye, and that one as gray as a cloudy day. The other eye was covered with a patch.

There did not seem to be any tails, horns, or fangs among them. There were some alarmingly hairy faces and plenty of big noses, though!

Six big noses, in fact: one long and hooked, two long and straight, one squashed and wide, one turned up at the end, and another as big and red as a radish.

Explanation:

Exaggeration is a term for a figure of speech. It creates a worse, or better, image or situation than it really is and used to highlight points and add emphasis to a feeling, an idea, an action, or a feature. When exaggeration is being used in writing, it allows one to describe something in a heightened way to make it more remarkable.

From the excerpt, we can see that the way the barbarians were being described to the fishermen was exaggerated. One example is:  There were some alarmingly hairy faces and plenty of big noses, though!

Therefore, readers can infer that the stories are exaggerations.

hi there!

one thousand and one nights, also called the arabian nights is a collection of middle eastern tales compiled in arabic during the islamic golden age, dated from the 8th to the 14th century. this collection was compiled of largely middle eastern and indian stories with an uncertain date and autorship whose tales such as aladdin, ali baba and sinbad the sailor -these ones were the most popular ones, the ones that have almost become part of western folklore.

as in much medieval european literature, the stories contained in this collection are set within a frame story. its scene is central asia, as known as "the islands or peninsulae of india and china", where king shahryar kills his wife after discovering her infidelities and as well as any other who betrayed him.   then, loathing all womankind, he marries and kills his new wife each day until no more candidates could have been found. his vizier had two daughters, scheherezade and dunyazad. the elder one -scheherezade- having devised a scheme to save herself and the others insisted that her father needed to give her in marriage to the king. each evening, she used to tell a story leaving it incomplete and promising to finish it the following night. the stories kept the king very interested, so eager to hear evey ending of each story, that he puts off her execution from day to day and finally he decided to give up with his plan. these stories are contained within the collection of 1001 nights, the bulk of the text is in prose, although verse is usually used for songs and riddles to express better the heightened emotion of them.

it is an infinitive phrase with a subject.